Android on Sprint! Good news and bad news...

Its official! Sprint is getting at least one Android phone in 2009!

Its hard to believe that it was almost 1 year ago that Sprint CEO Dan Hesse proclaimed that Google's Android OS wasn't "good enough" for the Sprint brand, despite Sprint being part of the Open Handset Alliance that is backing the Google phone OS (and releasing buggy phones all the time- who are we kidding, Dan?).
I personally think Mr. Hesse is making up excuses for T-mobile getting it first...
But whatever the case may be, this is good news, especially for those of us on Sprint who have been waiting for a peice of the Open-Source pie!

Now for the bad news...
Well, its not bad news for everyone, but I'll just call it less-than-good-news.

Lately, Sprint has developed a bad habit of forcing anticipated hot new phones to be on special "everything" plans, like the Palm Pre and the Samsung Instinct.
While some smartphones, like HTC's Windows Mobile handsets, seem to be immune to this phenomenon, I have reason to beleive that this handset will not be an exception.

There have been rumors of a new Samsung phone running Android called the InstinctQ, which just passed WiFi certification. So far, the other two Samsung phones called "Instinct" were exclusive to Sprint, so if this rumor is true, it points to what may very well be the new Android handset Mr. Hesse was referring to.
The problem is, like other handsets marked "Instinct" (original Instinct and Instinct S30), Sprint has them exclusively and forces them to work only on their more expensive plans.

This is surely bad news for anyone on a budget plan, family plan, or grandfathered plan (SERO users, I feel your pain). You heard it here first, folks- I do hope I'm wrong about this... please, if anyone finds anything that shows I may be wrong, let me know!